Helen Lehndorf

Category: writing

  • the journal project

    I’m writing two books at the moment (I think I’ve mentioned this before…), my second poetry collection and a book about my journals from 2000-2012. I’m turning 40 this year, the way I journal has kind of changed lately and I want to capture what my journals meant to me and did for me during the years my children were babies, then wee ‘uns. My journals really helped me stay sane during my most intensive stay-at-home-mother years. (I always had paid work, but I did it from home when my kids were wee.)

    Here’s some of the journal pages from this project – I’m also writing a long …essay? um, prose-something…to go alongside the original journal pages…

    I veer wildly with this project between thinking it is banal and self-indulgent, to thinking that perhaps it  DOES have some merit and might be interesting to other people. This week, happily, has been the latter.

     

     

  • art will eat itself

    I am working on two writing projects at the moment (around the day job, the kids, the endless house-keeping and cooking)…

    One is my next collection of poems and the other is less simple – a project involving over a decade of journals. I am scanning a whole lot of journal pages from 1999-2012…it will be a very visual book. This project is tricky – I haven’t quite found my way with it yet. It’s like it isn’t sure what it wants to be….I don’t want it to be a ‘how to’ about journaling, because I don’t find those books especially helpful myself…plus I don’t think I have much to add to that canon….however it may have elements of that. I am writing some prose pieces to sit amongst the scanned journal pages, but I’m not sure they are right in tone. It’s like I am putting together a book that is almost devouring itself – like the OUROBOROS.

    I’m both sharing parts of my journals and yet critiquing them and journaling and the creative process all at once.  It’s all very messy and more than a little scary, however I’m going to keep chipping away at it and trust that as I work the shape of the book will become clear. Basically, I am trying to write the sort of book I would be excited to find in a bookshop….full of images, honesty, ruminations on creative process, thoughtful mess.

    In the meantime, I take comfort from writers who have gone before me.

    ‘Any writer who knows what he is doing isn’t doing very much.’

    -Nelson Algren

    &

    ‘The furtherest out you can go is the best place to be.’

    -Stanley Elkin’

  • Graft is launched

    I went to a lovely poetry event in Paekakariki last Saturday – the launch of Lynn Davidson’s ‘Common Land’ (VUP) and a local celebration of the recently launched ‘Graft’ by Helen Heath (VUP). Both poets were interviewed by Paekakariki poet, Dinah Hawken. It was a lovely laid-back affair with mood-lighting, a traditional ‘hall supper’, wine, tea and live music after the poetry. Quite relaxed and wonderful!

    Here are Dinah Hawken, Lynn Davidson and Helen Heath:

    Here are two of my dear friends, whom I love very much and who will probably kill me for putting a photograph of them on the internet:

    Here is a random shot of some people enjoying the night – I wanted to show you the beautiful rose-lamp! :

    Congratulations, Helen, on all the ‘graft’ that went into this terrific book. It has certainly paid off – what a great achievement!

    ‘Graft’ is rich and carefully-crafted book. There are affecting and emotional poems about the terroire of motherhood and grief. There are sad/funny/sad poems about a composite character from the Hutt Vally called ‘Justine’. There are playful and moving poems about science and scientists. In short, there is a lot going on in this slim volume and it is a dense, satisfying read.

    Here’s to charmed evenings in little town halls, with moody lighting, poetry, live music and home-made lamingtons! I could do that every Saturday…

  • The David Merritt Experience

    I met David Merritt late last year when a colleague introduced us. We had a coffee and talked poetry and chickens and politics and I was very impressed by his dry, self-effacing humour and sharp-as-a-tack brain. When you talk to David it isn’t like the tennis of usual conversation: my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn, in measured thwoks….it’s more like chasing a snake through the grass – sometime he is right there, present and gleaming and you’re close – so close! and then he slips off into some elusive (but usually hilarious) tangent and you’ve lost him again.

    He’s a poet – a unique one, in that he makes small books out of the waste of other books (usually Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics which he rescues by the box-load from Dump shops because they don’t sell.) He tours the country, sitting on the street, making books, talking to people and selling his books out of a little wooden drawer ‘for the price of a good cup of coffee’.

    Last night he ended his latest tour of the country in Palmerston North (he lives kind of near by in Mangamahu) so I went along and it was a grand evening out.

    His performance is more ‘experience’ than typical reading, because he shuffles around the room, interacting with people so there is no illusion of the line between poet and audience, taking requests, talking and poking fun, laughing at himself and generally filling the space with his gentle, delightful presence and aroha.

    The night reminded me of a parlour performance I attended by the incredible actor Warwick Broadhead – there was the same invitation to people (not literally, but invoked) to engage, to be more present in their lives, to challenge what they are being offered and turn it into something better.

    The local ‘support’ act was Rob Thorne who does amazing things with Nga Taonga Puoru and effects pedals. Then David was accompanied by Chris Heazlewood (formerly of King Loser) on guitar playing incidental music between and behind the poems. The guitar playing was subtle and interesting and enhanced the poetry very well.

    There is no doubt from his poetry that David is a romantic – nature is beautiful and pure, jobs are for sell-outs, the disenfranchised are heroic, relationships with women are either high-romance or hate – however, I am entirely susceptible to this manner of romance, so heartily enjoyed it and found myself crying at one of David’s ‘barbaric yawp’-style poems exhorting the reader to shoot him if he finds himself in a litany of deadening situations – the kind that probably most of the audience dwell – suburban housing, day jobs etc.

    I had a great night and went home fizzy with ideas and inspiration. If the David Merritt Experience passes through your town – I reckon you should definitely make the effort go. It is entertaining, involving, funny, moving and much, much better than anything on the TV.

     

  • the next step

    ‘Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.’ -Chuck Close

    Halfway through last year I started work on my second book. The first book was out of my hands while  it was being edited, laid out and designed.

    I had some notion of what I wanted the second book to be all about. Books begin with opening a new document on a word-processing package, so I opened one, gave it a working title and got started.

    I have written about a third of it. It is not going where I want it to go. It is not the book I had in my head when I opened that new document. This is a common experience.

    ‘A poem that doesn’t get out of hand isn’t a poem.’ -John Hollander

    The writing has been lurching off into strange side-alleys and cul-de-sacs – uncomfortable places.

    I don’t want to write the book that the book wants to become.

    ‘She’s lost control again’ -Joy Division

    Last week I hit a bit of a wall with it and thought I should give up writing. The writing life is hard, harder than you might think if you are outside looking in. I feel vulnerable and tired. I get sick of getting rejection letters 70% of the time, of missing out on funding. Keeping writing going in my life is a fight. Fighting takes a lot of energy.

    The new book is telling me this: Drag it out into the light. That is this book’s imperative.

    This post sounds a bit mental – like I’m hearing voices. What can I say? This is how I experience my writing self, my writing life.

    I feel like I’m fighting with myself. It is a violent fight. People are getting hurt.

    Everything I write lately is tangential, difficult and odd.

    ‘Sentimentality – that’s what we call the sentiment we don’t share.’ -Graham Greene

    A friend told me to ‘stop second-guessing yourself.’ Whenever anyone tells me to stop doing anything  it makes me do it more. The elephant is in the room. The emperor is naked.

    It is good advice.

    I feel extremely confused about who I am as a writer right now.

    ‘Find out who you are and do it on purpose.’ -Dolly Parton

    My friend Pip once interviewed David Vann and he told her that tragedy is when a protagonist is forced to make a choice and whichever way he chooses, he loses half of himself.

    I love imperatives and maxims and bold assertions because I feel so unsure of anything lately. Experiencing life as all nuance, all complexity, all ambivalence, all sensate and half-truth and murmur and roar and silence and spiritual nihilism and nothing that ends with an ‘ism’ makes certainty so attractive.

    I’m so hot for other people’s certainty.

    ‘Poetry springs from something deeper, it is beyond intelligence. It may not even be linked with wisdom.’ -Jorge Luis Borges

    I am going to keep writing. I feel as weak as a new-born kitten as I type that.

    I get more courage from THESE PEOPLE than from anyone who ever taught me writing.

    ‘Writing 101: moral courage is seldom the subject, but it is often the prerequisite.’ -D.A.Powell

  • ‘The Comforter’ has a cover!

    My book is going to print at the end of this week! I can’t believe it.

    Helen Rickerby, who owns Seraph Press and edited the book, has somehow made the process of editing and co-ordinating the book (seem) effortless AND even fun. She is a wonderful editor who really gets behind the poets she publishes, deeply engages with the writing and works to present the poetry in the best possible way.

    So anyway, drum roll please, here is the cover! (There is much more to Sarah Laing’s design than just the front cover – there is a beautiful back cover, book flaps, inside cover and illustrations within – however – I want to leave some of it as a surprise for the ‘in real life’ experience of the book!)

    So for now, here’s the front:

    The textile art is by Melissa Wastney, a friend whose artwork I love very much.

    I wanted something for the cover that combined my love of nature and textiles, and which was elegant and understated. I think designer Sarah Laing has more than achieved that. Thanks so much, Sarah! I love the texture and wrinkles of the slubby linen and the way the trees look like they could be underground…

    (The book will be launched in Palmerston North on the 2nd December and in Wellington on the 3rd December. Launch details to come.)

  • the trail is not a trail

    One of my favourite poets is American poet Gary Snyder. He is described as the ‘poet laureate of deep ecology’ by some and I would agree with that. I guess he is a natural fit for me – he studied Zen Buddhism in Japan for years and writes a lot about the human spirit and nature.

    I have to defend his work from most of my poet friends who think his stuff is ‘obvious’ or romanticises nature or whatever – but I think a) the simplicity of his work often echoes that of the Zen Koan (short poems or spiritual conundrums) he is obviously schooled in.

    You could say this very famous poem by seventeenth century Japanese poet Masahide is ‘obvious’ and yet in its simplicity it also contains multitudes of meaning:

    Barn’s burnt down-

    now I can see

    the moon.

    *

    And b) I don’t find his nature writing to be ‘romantic’. I find it to be frank and direct. However, it is hard to write ANYTHING about nature in the 21st century and not be accused of being ‘romantic’ and Wordsworthian. Nature poetry has an undeserved bad rap, I think.

    Anyway, here is my current favourite Gary Snyder poem. Like a Zen koan, it is deceptively simple and yet depending on your reading of it can blow out and up and be a big existential gesture. As well as enjoying it aesthetically, I am returning to it lately as a reminder of mindfulness…because the trail is not a trail, there is no destination, ….or if there is it is only death – hence the pressing need to be present in the moment!

    Here it is:

    The Trail is Not A Trail

    by Gary Snyder

    (from Left Out In The Rain, North Point Press, 1986)

    I drove down the Freeway
    And turned off at an exit
    And went along a highway
    Til it came to a sideroad
    Drove up the sideroad
    Til it turned to a dirt road
    Full of bumps, and stopped.
    Walked up a trail
    But the trail got rough
    And it faded away—
    Out in the open,
    Everywhere to go.